Bird

by Crystal Chan

  I had to change the subject. “Where are you from, anyway?”

  His studied me. “How do you know all that?”

  I swatted at a fat horsefly on my leg and shrugged, feeling smaller. It was suddenly stifling hot in the canopy of the tree.

  “Tell me, or I’ll throw these binoculars at you.”

  My head snapped up just in time for me to see a huge grin on John’s face. I laughed, and it felt good. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “You’re right. They’re expensive binoculars.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him, and a spot between my shoulder blades relaxed. I paused. “I want to be a geologist when I grow up.”

  John nodded seriously. “You’d be a great one.”

  My heart tumbled out of my chest, off my branch, and onto the ground.

  “Really,” he continued. “You’re not like the other girls in this stupid town, where they just want to be like each other. You climb trees at night. You do things by yourself.”

  I did things by myself because I didn’t have a choice.

  “Geologists need to set their own course.” John nodded confidently. “All scientists do.”

  I stared at him. How was it I’d never heard about John before? Caledonia is so small that everyone doesn’t just know everyone else’s business, they actually know everyone else’s business before that business becomes business. Like when the Rogers’ house burned down in a lightning storm, we had a raffle and Belgian waffle fund-raiser, but the raffle tickets sold out even before they went on sale. That kind of thing. It was amazing that I’d never heard about Mr. McLaren’s nephew John, because he’s sure the news that people like to talk about.

  “Where are you from?” I asked John again.

  “Not from here.” He raised his binoculars again and studied the birds in the tree, but they were too close for the binoculars. Even I knew that.

  “Why are you visiting your uncle?”

  “Why does anyone visit their uncle? Because they have to.”

  I was surprised at how edged those words were, like scissors snipping through velvet. I was even more surprised at how he didn’t want to visit his uncle. I would be excited to visit my uncles, any of them, if I knew them. The truth is, I don’t even know if they exist, on either side.

  “You’re lucky,” I said. “I’d visit my uncle, if I had one.”

  John’s face went hard, like onyx. “Good for you.”

  The tension in the air suddenly grew so thick we didn’t need tree limbs to sit on anymore, we could have sat on one of those words that just crawled out and got huge.

  I shifted uncomfortably. It’s not like I meant to make him mad or anything. I wanted to say something like, Sorry for upsetting you, like they do on TV shows, but I wasn’t sure if people actually said things like that. Those words certainly aren’t said in my family. They’re just smothered by silence.

  “Want to keep climbing?” I asked, scootching over to the trunk of the tree and standing up. “I can show you this squirrel’s nest.”

  He looked at me, and his face shifted. Softened, no longer stone.

  We climbed for hours that summer afternoon, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, sometimes sweating too hard to talk. Getting to know a tree is hard work. You have to know how its leaves smell in the heavy heat of summer, how its branches clatter against one another in the autumn winds, and how the rain pours in rivulets down its trunk and drips off its branches in the storms. It takes time, pure and simple. The same thing is true with getting to know the earth or a river or a person. By the time the shadows were long, we were both pretty tired and hungry. John headed back through the cornfields and I walked my slow way home, wondering about Grandpa and John and how so many things could happen in one day.

  But something wasn’t sitting right, and it chewed at the edges of my thoughts. As I turned up our mile-long driveway, it hit me: John hadn’t come from the direction of Mr. McLaren’s house, where he said he’d seen me. And when he left, he certainly wasn’t headed back there.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “YOU were at the cliff?” Mom asked. It wasn’t really a question. It didn’t have to be, since I told Mr. Williamson, and he told my parents and probably the rest of the town.

  My feet fidgeted under the kitchen table. I couldn’t look at her, or Dad, either. It didn’t help that they had been waiting for me to get home for two whole hours—and that was after being delayed at the hospital. I had left a note, but I guess I forgot to tell them when I was going to come back. The only time they seem to remember me is when I’m in trouble. Which isn’t that often, but still.

  Mom glared at Dad. “You see what happens when she listens to your talk?” Her voice was low.

  “Just this morning,” I said. “Not this afternoon.”

  Dad shook his head, avoiding Mom’s eyes. He stood in the doorway, away from both of us.

  “You see what happens?” Mom said again. She punched the buttons on the microwave to reheat the rice and peas, plantains, and chicken that Dad made a couple days ago. She punched the buttons a lot harder than she needed to.

  “Mr. Williamson said I found Grandpa just in time,” I said, tucking my hands under my thighs.

  “It wouldn’t have been ‘just in time’ if you had been home,” Mom said.

  My stomach tightened. All the other kids would have been sleeping that early in the morning and all their grandpas would have died, I thought. I’d known that Grandpa wouldn’t thank me, but I didn’t expect this. Did no one notice that I’d saved his life this morning? Why was that difficult to see?

  The microwave churned and hummed, warming our dinner. Dad finally moved from his doorway post and set the table, avoiding Mom as much as he could; when the microwave buzzer beeped, it cut through the heavy air, and we ate dinner with a cold clattering of metal on plates.

  This is what I mean about silence. My parents didn’t ask me why I went to the cliff, how often I go, or if they can go with me. They didn’t ask how I feel when I go, or if I wonder about Bird, or if I wish I could fly after him. They didn’t even tell me what it was like in the hospital, how scared they were, or how Grandpa was recovering. Or why he let his blood sugar drop so low in the first place.

  It’s almost as if we’re afraid of words. They hang in the air, unspoken, and then seeing that they’re not going to be used, they shrivel and die. It’s no wonder that my mouth opened up this morning and made noise when it wasn’t supposed to. Maybe my mouth is getting tired of keeping things pent up like that and spurted out a couple of words in protest. I can’t blame it for going a little crazy with all the silence.

  As we were finishing up, Dad wiped his lips with his napkin and looked at me. “Don’t go back there, Jewel. It’s not a good place.”

  “I know.”

  “There are duppies there, like I told you.” He placed his hands on the table and rubbed his thumbnails, which meant he was worried. “The spirit world is not something to take lightly.”

  Mom sighed—almost inaudibly, but I heard it.

  Dad pretended he didn’t hear her. “I am very disappointed in you, Jewel.”

  I looked down at my plate. I’d known he would say that, but the words still gashed through me.

  “You need to get a job,” Mom cut in. “You have too much free time this summer.”

  And that was the end of the conversation. Dad went to check on Grandpa and give him his dinner, and I helped Mom clean up, but even though I scrubbed the table really good, just how she likes, she didn’t look at me. Not once.

  Mom was surprised at how hard it was for me to get a summer job. She kept saying she knew Mrs. Jameson needed help with her bakery deliveries, which I could do by bike, and the Matthews’ had three kids that needed babysitting, and Mr. Perry’s dog, Burger, always needed a walk. For some reason, though, no one seemed too interested when Mom brought up the idea of me helping out.

  So instead, Mom made a list of things for me to do when she and Dad were at work.

>   Jewel’s Summer Chores*:

  1. Mondays: Pick up around the house

  2. Tuesdays: Mow the lawn and weed the garden

  3. Wednesdays: Vacuum

  4. Wednesdays and Fridays: Visit Mrs. Rodriguez

  5. Fridays: Clean the bathroom

  * In general: Go through your closet, throw out your unwanted stuff from the attic, and kill the ants in the kitchen. (They keep coming back.)

  The only chores that I didn’t mind were mowing the lawn, because the riding lawn mower was pretty fun, and weeding Dad’s garden. Dad grows all kinds of flowers and vegetables, and even plants from Jamaica, but they never amount to anything more than a couple of droopy sprouts, as if the Iowan soil only wants to see corn and tomatoes pop up, not coconut and soursop and breadfruit trees. He often lets me help him garden, because he knows how much I love to dig in the earth. I do it when I’m upset—I just go and find some earth, and I dig. It may sound strange, but there’s something about making your arms work harder than they want to, about turning your hands into claws and your shoulders into motors and digging until you find things that you never saw before, things that you wouldn’t have seen unless you dug.

  Like arrowheads.

  Mom doesn’t like it when I find arrowheads. She tells me to stop wasting my time, stop daydreaming, and how can I be a teacher when I waste my brain digging in the dirt like a dog?

  “But I don’t want to be a teacher,” I told her once when we were folding clothes. “I want to be a geologist.” Mom looked at me when I said that, looked good and hard, to see if I was lying. Of course, I wasn’t.

  “I want you to have a nice, practical job,” she said.

  “Geologists are practical,” I told her. “They’re scientists.”

  “Digging in the backyard is not science,” Mom replied curtly as she held Dad’s T-shirt in her hands. “It’s daydreaming, just like your dad.” She looked up to the ceiling, like she couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. Then she started folding clothes again, pressing each fold carefully, like I had never said anything at all.

  I never mentioned being a geologist again.

  But being a geologist was the only thing I could think about as I weeded Dad’s garden. How fantastic is it that Iowa used to be the bottom of a shallow sea, like the Gulf of Mexico, and that our hills, rolling and swelling like the ocean, used to be actual waves? The dirt that my hands scoop up used to be brachiopods, echinoderms, and corals. They used to be living and swimming, and now they’re dirt. And everything that’s living now will someday be dirt, too.

  Dirt is everything.

  I’m not sure how weeding will help me become a teacher.

  “Need any help?”

  I jumped and twisted my head up toward John’s voice. His jean shorts and T-shirt looked incredibly clean next to my grubby, dirt-covered clothes. “How’d you know I live here?” I said. I was more alarmed that I’d get in trouble for having someone over than the fact that, again, John had found me. Mom would say a guest would distract me from my chores.

  John tried to hide a smile. “Looks like there’s a lot of weeds to be pulled.”

  I sighed. “I’m learning how to be a teacher.”

  John’s eyebrows raised briefly. He knelt down next to me and started pulling up weeds and tossing them into my pile. “Not a geologist? They pick rocks, not weeds.”

  “They pick weeds when their mothers tell them to,” I said, ripping out a fistful of deep dandelion roots. Sweat already prickled my forehead. “Don’t say too much about geology around here,” I said. “Mom doesn’t like it.”

  We worked side by side under the lifting June sun, weeding our way through Dad’s garden. It was nice to have someone help me.

  “What are these plants?” John asked, pointing at Dad’s tiny sprouts of coconut and soursop and breadfruit.

  “They’re Jamaican tree saplings,” I said. “Dad thinks they’ll grow here. He wants a grove.”

  John gave me a look. “In Iowa?”

  “I know. Wrong soil.”

  “Wrong everything.” John grunted as he dug up some thick roots.

  I yanked another weed. “But he keeps telling me that maybe they’ll get used to it.”

  John paused. “That tropical trees will get used to Iowa?” he asked slowly.

  I nodded. I knew how stupid it sounded. Dad can be kind of optimistic like that.

  “Huh.” John sat back on his heels and looked at the contrails in the sky. “Your dad’s something else, you know.” He studied the planes overhead.

  “The cerasee is doing better than the trees,” I said, pointing to one corner of the garden. “I keep telling him to give up on the saplings, but he says those trees are good for the duppies.”

  That got his attention. “The what?”

  “Duppies,” I said. John was looking at me strangely, so I continued. “You have a soul and a spirit, and when you die, the soul goes to heaven and the spirit stays on earth for a couple more days with the body. If someone’s tears fall on the body during the funeral, or if something else like that happens, then the spirit is stuck on earth and haunts people. Makes trouble.”

  John’s eyes were pretty big by now.

  “Duppies don’t like some kinds of trees and plants,” I continued, “and if you plant them around your house, it helps keep them away.”

  “Really.”

  “It’s a Jamaican thing.”

  We weeded for a while in silence, and then he said, “What kind of trouble do duppies make?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, even though every fiber in me was screaming, Bird. I lowered my face between my shoulders so he couldn’t see my lie.

  “Do you believe in that stuff?” John asked.

  I couldn’t look at him even if I wanted to. “I don’t think so,” I said slowly. I’m not sure if I believe in duppies and souls and spirits, but a part of me felt like I was disrespecting Dad right then, because he does.

  We do all believe that Grandpa killed my brother when he gave him the nickname Bird. Names are important, and even though Grandpa didn’t mean to, he attracted a duppy into the house who followed my brother and convinced him to jump. Mom doesn’t believe in duppies, being a Catholic—not that we go to church much. She thinks that Grandpa killed Bird because his talk messed up Bird’s mind, got him confused. He was only a little kid, after all. “Loose lips sink ships,” she spat at Dad once, when they were arguing about Grandpa, “but loose lips killed our son.”

  “Duppies.” John was shaking his head. “That’s crazy.” He glanced at me. “No offense.”

  There. He said it. That’s crazy. I gave a little shrug, like I didn’t care very much about what he thought, but my lips sure zipped up tight. I was glad I didn’t mention anything about the cliff like I did with Mr. Williamson, and I decided right then not to say anything else important, like ask where John was headed to yesterday. Or where he really really came from.

  Instead, I said, “So where will you go when you’re an astronaut? Mars?”

  John tossed a couple more weeds into a new pile. “Nah. Mars is overrated. I’ll go to Jupiter’s moons.”

  “Moons? More than one?” A trickle of sweat ran down my neck. A rock crushed into my knee, and my back was starting to get tight on me. Weeding was more work than I remembered.

  “Jupiter has over sixty moons.” John sat back on his haunches. “The biggest ones are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. I’m going to be the first astronaut to land on those.”

  Sixty moons. Imagine how great Jupiter’s night sky would be.

  Just then I heard something behind me, and I turned.

  Grandpa.

  Grandpa, who never comes near me. The air grew colder, like he was freezing everything around him, including every limb in my body. He stood not ten feet away from John and me, on the grass, in his boxers and a thin, white T-shirt.

  I sucked in my breath and struggled to my feet, averting my gaze. “Grandpa, this is John.”
>
  “Hey there,” John said, standing up and wiping his hands on his shorts. He extended his hand to Grandpa.

  Grandpa’s eyes were as big as eggs.

  John’s hand was still stuck out, warm and friendly.

  Grandpa was still staring. I never saw him stare before; usually he makes it a point not to look at anything.

  “We met yesterday,” I said, trying to shake the ice from under my skin.

  Suddenly, Grandpa’s nostrils flared, and his eyes squinted into slits.

  John put his hand down.

  The sun stopped climbing up the sky.

  Then, to my horror, Grandpa smacked his lips and spit on the ground, by John’s feet, and he made an X in the grass with his toe.

  John backed up a couple inches and his jaw dropped. If I were him, I would have just run away. But John’s back straightened and he lifted his chin slightly. “I’m sorry if I did something wrong,” he said, “but the garden is weeded. I hope you have a nice d—”

  Grandpa scowled and made a funny gesture with his hand, one that I’d never seen before. Then he made another X in the ground.

  John’s mouth fell open. It was as if his words dropped, midair, from shock.

  I hung my head and waited to hear John’s footsteps as he walked away. I waited to hear him say that with all the craziness that’s in my family, I didn’t deserve his company. A lump formed in my throat. John had seemed like he really wanted to be my friend.

  I had been so close.

  “Come on,” John said to me. “Let’s go somewhere.”

  I yanked my head up. Grandpa had moved back about ten feet away from us, listening to every word. John was talking as if Grandpa wasn’t even there.